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Young Arthur – bullied at school and struggling with his dad Johnny Vegas – seeks sanctuary at his local pool

Sheffield-based YouTuber Luke Cutforth here ventures into – that dread phrase – long-form content, with a thin slip of YA fantasy (drawn from a novel by Caroline Smailes) about a humiliated schoolboy retrieved from the brink of self-sacrifice. Cutforth clearly knows his way around a camera, which isn’t always the case at the industry’s lower-budget end; with cinematographer Josh Winslade, he makes atmospheric use of his primary location, Manchester’s Victoria Baths, recast as an abandoned spa. Yet the pacing proves sluggish, and the adaptation broadly unpersuasive: a fifth-former’s creative writing assignment, with clunky exposition and potential elements of autobiography that elicit sporadic cringes.

Cutforth has engineered one noteworthy casting coup. We know young Arthur (James Tarpey) has it bad because he’s being raised by Johnny Vegas, welded into a...